2000 (Back to Contents)

In Homage to Le Nôtre
Tom Stuart-Smith (1973)

Many gardens designed for the Chelsea Flower show have a protracted gestation period and the garden that I designed for the Garden History Society in association with Historic Royal palaces for May 2000 was no exception.

On the 15th September 1700 André Le Nôtre, gardener to Louis XIV, and probably the most powerful and influential gardener who ever lived, died at the age of 87. Over the previous 60 years he had been responsible for laying out most of the great gardens in and around Paris that epitomised the absolute power of the Sun King. These included Versailles, the Tuilleries, Fontainebleu, Chantilly and St Cloud. His influence spread across the whole of Europe, not least to England, where he prepared designs for Charles II at Greenwich Palace .

In the spring of 1999 the Director of Le Chateau de Versailles decided to mark the tercentenary of Le Nôtre's death by holding a special exhibition at the Palace over the summer of 2000. They approached Historic Royal Palaces (who are responsible for Hampton Court, Greenwich Palace and the Tower of London) together with the Garden History Society to see whether they would be interested in making some contribution to the event. The challenge was taken up at the Garden History Society who devised the idea of creating a garden at Chelsea, finding the sponsorship for it and then taking it to Versailles afterwards. Sadly, at the last moment the Versailles exhibition had to be cancelled, when the storms of January 2000 devastated much of central northern France, but the garden at Chelsea went ahead as planned.

When I was approached about the idea, I immediately thought that we should make a garden that illustrated the timeless quality of Le Nôtre's style and showed why he has remained a source of inspiration for traditionalists and modernists alike. The garden should therefore aim to capture some of the spirit of Le Nôtre rather than attempt the impossible task of reproducing the vast splendour of Versailles in 200 square metres of SW6. The question of scale is especially important, for almost all the great gardens of Le Nôtre give the illusion of infinite extent. We addressed this by using a large inclined mirror set into a sloping box hedge at the back of the garden to reflect the sky. In the event, the mirror reflected the overhanging branches of the plane trees in the garden and this created a pleasing sense of abstraction at the end of the garden, if not quite the illusion of infinity I had anticipated.

A spiral labyrinth of box formed the centre piece of the composition and was the key historical reference in the garden. It was designed by a pupil of Le Nôtre and laid out in a number of gardens both in France and England, including Chantilly, Wentworth Woodhouse and Cholmondeley Castle. It is therefore something of a symbol of the Anglo French gardening tradition. In its original forms it extended over several acres and comprised thousands of trees and shrubs set within a matrix of tall hedges. At Chelsea, it was made up of 4000 box plants planted into a matrix of 70 steel mesh cages and covering an area 10 by 5 metres. This was planted in December at a density of 120 plants per square metre. It was then clipped several times to keep the edges as sharp as possible

The back part of the garden comprised a long canal of water flanked by 4 parterres planted with grass and studded with wild and exotic flowers and bulbs. This planting was based on the "Enameld Lawns" of early 18th century English gardens which seem like the forbears of the modern meadow garden, but within a very formal context. All the exotic flowers were typical of those that would have been familiar to Le Nôtre and included columbine, double flowered buttercup, jonquil and martagon lily. This flowery turf is painstakingly put together with tufts of grass intermeshed with about 120 flowering plants and bulbs for every square metre. These were the only plants in the whole garden that were actually taken out of their pots. Most of the flowers were forced under glass, or held back in cold storage to ensure they were in perfect condition on the day. Bulbs present a special problem as the flowers tend to wilt rapidly in the heat and so have to be added at the last moment when you would much rather be done and dusted.

Like many Chelsea gardens this one 'In Homage to Le Nôtre' was extremely cosmopolitan. The box and hornbeam hedges came from Germany and the immaculately pruned bay trees which formed an imposing grid over the garden were found in a small nursery in Tuscany. Stone for the tablets with inscriptions to Le Nôtre came, appropriately, from France. The garden was sponsored by Laurent-Perrier, Merrill Lynch and Harpers & Queen without whom the gold medal it received would have been impossible. The Chelsea Flower show is an exciting, exhausting, by turns amusing and frustrating, but above all, expensive exercise!

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